Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Obama's Bitter Muse: Frank M. Davis

The following article—by yours truly—first appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen and The Des Moines Register on Wednesday, April 30, 2008. For a while, it was available online as well, but since those links have now expired, I'm making it available here.

Obama's Bitter Muse: Frank M. Davis

I was a weaver of jagged wordsA warbler of garbled tunesA singer of savage songsI was bitterYesBitter and sorely sadFor when I wroteI dipped my penIn the crazy heartOf mad America

—Frank Marshall Davis

Of the potential father figures in Barack Obama’s autobiography "Dreams from My Father," one of the first—and most mysterious—is a poet whom we only ever know as “Frank.”

"Dreams from My Father" credits Frank with being the sole older black man in Hawaii to take seriously the teenage Obama’s search for identity, and the poet thus becomes a major touchstone in Obama’s life. Nearly every time Obama reflects on his role models, the memory of Frank comes up.

When Obama first meets him, Frank is nearly 80 years old and living “in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki.” The man with “a big, dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion” read poetry to Obama, shared whiskey, and sometimes asked for help writing dirty limericks. And in that house “with its wobbly porch and low-pitched roof,” the two men separated by 60 years in age talked about the reality of racism in America. Those discussions—filled with Frank’s anger, warnings, and bitter realism—stay with Obama through the book.

“That’s the way it is,” Obama remembers Frank saying, “You might as well get used to it.”

‘Negative Capability’

It’s a strange withholding, in a book as candid as "Dreams from My Father," that Obama doesn’t reveal Frank’s full name, much less anything from his past. For Frank was in fact a real, published poet, and knowing more about him might help illuminate who Obama is now and his relationship to the past. It might also help explain Obama’s nigh-poetic capacity for “negative capability”—the term John Keats coined in 1817 to describe someone’s ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

“Frank” is Frank Marshall Davis, a poet, journalist, and activist.

Davis was born in Kansas in 1905 and died in Hawaii in 1987. He published four books of poems that are now collected and published by the University of Illinois Press as "Black Moods" (2002). Davis began writing poetry just after the Harlem Renaissance, but unlike Langston Hughes (also a Midwesterner), Davis didn’t move East. He worked as a journalist in Chicago’s Harlem, known as Bronzeville—the same south-side neighborhood Obama would represent as an Illinois state senator. Apparently, Davis felt equally at home writing poems as he did articles about bootlegging and Bronzeville politics.

Davis, who went on to edit the first successful daily black newspaper in U.S. history, also wrote an autobiography, "Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet" (1992). That autobiography begins with a harrowing story of how Davis was lynched by a group of white boys when he was 5. The bitterness stemming from that event hangs over the book, just as Frank’s bitterness echoes through Obama’s.

For Davis, there is no evading the impediment of Jim Crow violence and prejudice, and, because of this, "Livin’ the Blues" becomes something of an anti-Horatio Alger tale. At the same time, though, in the amount of spirit, music, humor, resilience, and creativity that Davis records in the face of racist impediments, Livin’ the Blues in some ways out-Algers Alger.

‘A Solitary Rebel’

Interestingly, anti-Obama crusaders know more about Davis (whom they call “Obama’s communist mentor”) than Obama’s own political party does. Like many individuals interested in combating American racism in the 1930s and 40s, Davis worked with people affiliated with the Communist Party. He was never a card-carrying member himself; in fact, in "Livin’ the Blues" he calls himself “a solitary rebel” who avoided joining any organization at all.

Nevertheless, the FBI assigned agents to track and harass Davis and his white wife when the two moved to Hawaii in 1949.

More interesting than Davis’ association with supposed communists is the fact that his life doesn’t, in fact, fit into the categories by which either the right or the left tend to operate. Davis, for example, was a Republican who voted against Roosevelt throughout the 1930s. He spoke as a heterosexual black man on behalf of gay rights. He openly linked Jewish and black experiences of oppression and raged against America’s hypocrisy as it fought Nazi Germany while maintaining a race-based caste system at home.

A Republican with Communist friends?

A journalist who wrote poetry?

Bitterness tempered by hope?

On the surface, it’s easy to see what Davis and Obama have in common; both were born in Kansas, both have families with mixed race marriages, both lived in Hawaii. That Obama would later represent the part of Chicago that Davis wrote about years before is suggestive as well.

Davis certainly was one role model for the young Obama. But Davis—even, or especially, in the specific bitterness he comes to represent in "Dreams from My Father"—may be Obama’s muse as well.

About Me

Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

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"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

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"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasarshows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

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"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry

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"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

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"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

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"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

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"Everyday Reading goes far in illustrating how poetry played a much larger role in most Americans' lives than it does today. Chasar paints a picture of a more various and ultimately dissident American public than most might have expected, a public for whom poetry was a crucial part of an overall strategy to counter the dominant political, economic, and social paradigms of their era. Written beautifully and researched meticulously, Everyday Reading will prove an important resource for political and cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone else interested in how poetry transcends the page and becomes an active part of how we spend our days." — Daniel Kane, Journal of American Studies

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"Highly recommended." — Choice

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"Everyday Reading is sure to act as a touchstone for scholars interested in popular digital literature as well as the contemporary avant-garde....[It] concludes with a flourish: an anecdote about the author's grandmother's use of clipped poetry in wartime letters to her husband that evidences Chasar's arguments while remaining personal and poignant. It is a fitting moment for a book that is so innovative, important, and constantly successful" — David Levine, CollegeLiterature

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"Scrapbooking, which appears in other chapters following the first one, becomes the controlling metaphor for Chasar's study—and for reading habits today. With so many cultural products driven by individual tastes and various engines of a global economy, readers inevitably select and construct their own 'tradition,' which may have much or little to do with what they have been taught is important. Chasar's well-documented, thoughtful book offers the larger picture of this phenomenon, of which the battle for the best is only part of the story." — Rhonda Pettit, Reception

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"A brilliantly written book, startling the reader with his thorough research and analysis" — Sheila Erwin, Portland Book Review

Now Available from the University of Iowa Press

"[Poetry after Cultural Studies] should become an important part of debates about what poets do, what their poems are good for." — Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry